At the start of my freshman year, I had been living as a man for about 13 months. I arrived at Harvard galvanized by my senior year at Phillips Exeter Academy, where I had delighted in kicking up a ruckus by living my final year as openly transgender. I remained in a girls' dorm (Though a student's rather shocked mother asked me on opening day whether the dorm was coed — I was thrilled.) and played goalie on the girls' varsity hockey and lacrosse teams — I'd pull off my helmet at the end of games and the opposing team would glare at me, somewhere between alarmed and outraged. One opposing coach tried to get the game thrown out.

In short, I was a liminal figure, occupying that androgynous zone granted normally only to the very young. With most people I met for the first time, I passed as a guy, but I lived in surroundings where I had been known as a woman. Given the entirely new context of Harvard, I wasn't sure what others would make of me. Or what I would make of myself.

That fall, I moved into my single room on a men's hall. The hall had two bathrooms designed with modesty in mind: a single toilet with a door and a single shower with a curtain. As is wont to happen in randomly assigned freshman dorms, I scarcely saw the guys on my hall. The moment of gender demarcation that I had expected to come from living with men and sharing a bathroom with them never came. (In fact, I was a little disappointed. I had practiced all summer to be able to pee standing up — I used a rolled up clear plastic coffee can lid as a funnel — in anticipation of using communal urinals. But my hallway provided me no such opportunity.)

As defining moments will, mine came when I least expected it. It was a sunny day in late October, and I was outside, killing time before my next class. That class was introductory Italian taken in order to fulfill the foreign language requirement, which I had not passed out of despite years of Latin in high school. O tempore. O mores. Or something like that. I rather enjoyed my Italian class. It was led by a native Italian named Gloria, who was tall, blonde, and prone to clothing her curvaceous figure in rather clingy attire. I fumbled my way through basic phrases and a baffling book entitled "L'imbianchini non hanno Ricordi." It had something to do with a corpse that turned out not to be dead after all. Or at least that is what my translation rendered as plot.

Abruptly, another student joined me in the sunshine. It was a fellow freshman, a crew jock from Connecticut, P. Wellington Wadsworth IV, known as Wells. "So, what do you think of Italian? What do you think of Gloria?" Wells asked. I attempted a feeble response, "She seems really..." but Wells cut across my reply; extending his hands about a foot in front of his chest, he said: "Great tracts of land, huh?" In that instant, I was, I admit, both excited and gratified. This was a guy — and not some weedy, pimply excuse for a guy, but a second boat, tall and handsome guy — sharing casual, straight, sexual innuendo with me. I felt like I had aced some sort of test.

As soon as this wave of exhilaration had washed over me, I was clouded with doubt and guilt. Weren't Wells' comments rude and inappropriate? In order to be transgender, in order to live as a man, did I have to sacrifice my feminist ideals? If I had overheard his comments when I was a sophomore or junior in high school, during those years that I had lived as a militant (well, kind of, as much as Exeter would allow) lesbian — when my Latin teacher used to call me "Alice with a Y" in mockery of my preferred spelling of womyn — I would have attacked Wells for objectifying and belittling a woman. Had I changed that much?

In truth, what had changed was that I was not overhearing this remark — I was its intended audience. My reaction weighed heavily on me as defining what it meant to be a guy and what it meant to be transgender. If I wanted to pass, to be a man, did I have to answer his remark in an approving fashion? Would any reply short of agreement and acceptance signal that I was not a man but someone who used to be a woman?

Wells was, by now, expounding on Gloria's physical attributes beyond her acreage, as casually as if he were talking about last night's game. Jumping in, I said, not quite truthfully, "I hadn't noticed, Wells. I'm more interested in trying to understand what she says." "Who cares about that?" he shot back.

For the following months I went over this conversation in my mind. In class, I tried to keep my eyes averted from Gloria's voluptuous spandex-clad form, but couldn't help noticing Wells' ogling. In that room, it was so stark: Gloria was a woman, Wells was a man, I was a pathetic in-between not quite on either side. I had tried to live as a woman and knew that I was not a woman on any standards — especially Gloria's. I was trying to live as a man yet not conform to patriarchal expectations. Would I be forever in the gray area? Or would I somehow make it onto the same playing field as the other guys?

Ultimately, satisfaction came one class when Gloria, desperate to get more people talking, asked each of us to describe our ideal mate. With limited vocabularies, we could not be too picky: the class chimed in with preferred hobbies, "footing," "musica," or with physical attributes, "bello," "bruno." Then Wells spoke up, "Alta, bionda..." Gloria smiled a bit as she recognized her description, and Wells continued in English: "How about you?" Her smile widened and she replied, "Belli scarpi. Good shoes." Wells' eyes fell to his dirty Nikes as he clearly contemplated his downfall. I looked at my own brown Skechers; they were a far cry from fine Italian leather, but on these terms maybe I could be a guy after all.

Alex Myers's writing, fiction and nonfiction, has won the 2008 Tiny Lights personal narrative competition, been a semifinalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom competition and a finalist in a Glimmertrain short story contest as well as published in a variety of markets, including Apple Valley Review, Word Riot, Fiction Weekly, and Johnny America. Myers lives and teaches in Rhode Island.